Labour Leaders

Saturday 28 June 2014

UEA London, 102 Middlesex St, London E1 7EZ

(UEA London is a 5 minute walk from Liverpool Street train station)

Who was the most successful Labour party leader of all time? And who was the worst? If we were to just count general election victories Harold Wilson comes top with four victories. But does this tell the whole story?

The University of East Anglia, Queen Mary University of London and the Political Studies Association Political Leadership group are hosting an event to address these questions. The project will involve leading biographers and experts on each of the Labour party leaders speaking at an event held at the University of East Anglia's London Campus near Liverpool Street on Saturday 28th June 2014. Contributions from these talks will then form part of an edited collection with a leading publisher.

To kick-off the discussion Toby James will give an introductory talk setting out a framework for evaluating leaders. This suggests that we can assess leaders by looking at how successful they were in winning office, or moving their party towards the goal of winning of office during their tenure. It also suggests that it is helpful to think about five key tasks that leaders need to achieve to win elections: developing a winning electoral strategy, a sense of governing competence amongst the electorate, party management, winning the battle of ideas on key policy issues and constitutional management. Rt. Hon Charles Clarke has undertaken a simple statistical analysis of general election performance of the Labour leaders since Keir Hardie and he will present the conclusions in the form of a ‘league table'.

The biographers and experts (listed below) will then present their analysis on all of the Labour leaders to have fought a general election.